Words&Dirt

It’s been a while since I lost myself in an out-and-out thriller, and I’d forgotten how much fun they can be. Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a firecracker of a debut novel that left me aching for more at the end of each sitting. Blending near-future virtual reality immersion technology with an almost autistic passion for 1980s media, Cline has created a unique work of speculative fiction that feels cutting edge and retro at once. Though the book’s central message falters somewhat under scrutiny, Ready Player One is hugely entertaining and makes a noble effort to examine the ethical and technical challenges of next-generation virtual reality.

Wade Watts, our protagonist, is an impoverished midwestern teenager in a 2040s America where pretty much everything we currently fear about Earth’s socioeconomic, political, and environmental future has come true. Watts puts it like this:

Life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in “decline.” Some people even say it’s “collapsing.”  (17).

Understandably, Watts spends almost all his time jacked into the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation (OASIS)––the most significant technological development of the early 21st century. The OASIS is a fully immersive massively multiplayer game containing hundreds of planets, endless quests, and free avatars for anyone with Internet access. It’s technically a game, but Cline is quick to point out that the OASIS is a de facto “new way of life” for most of its dedicated users (56). The real world has simply become too painful and ugly to compete.

At the exposition, Watts and millions of other OASIS users are roughly five years into “The Hunt,” a contest initiated by the death of billionaire James Halliday, creator of the OASIS. Halliday was obsessed with 1980s videogames and culture, and spent his final years creating history’s most elaborate easter egg hunt inside the OASIS. The grand prize: his entire multi-hundred-billion dollar fortune.

Beyond the details of this opening scenario (which are themselves not exactly novel), Ready Player One unfolds more or less exactly how you’d expect. Watts gets lucky and becomes the first to solve the first stage of The Hunt, gets famous overnight, struggles against adversity, falls for a girl, gains just enough financial security to continue The Hunt, struggles some more, proves his ingenuity both inside and outside the OASIS, and wins the contest. Even with its high level of predictability, Cline manages to keep the story fresh and fun. I’m not quite old enough to have my full merit badge in 80s nostalgia, but I’m familiar enough with the time period to have enjoyed the geekery and understood most of the references.

Ready Player One has some significant flaws, many of which are apparent right off the bat. Cline is a clever and enthusiastic fellow, but not a very good writer. His prose is riddled with cliches and corny “witticisms,” although I’ll admit he knows how to drop a line from Return of the Jedi at exactly the right moment. His characters are largely adolescent in their interactions and motivations, and communicate with a peculiar affect I can only describe as “bro-geek-speak.” Cline throws in an evil Internet Service Provider company to play the villain, which would be fine except for the contradictory problem that, for all its wealth and resources, this particular army of corporate thugs is so utterly incompetent that it strains suspension of disbelief.

All of this would be negligible if not for the much more disconcerting irony embedded in this novel’s central message. Throughout the book, I felt ambivalent about how Cline both glorifies and criticizes the lifestyles of people whose purposeful pursuits reside solely within a simulation. Cline seems to have thought carefully about this problem and worked hard to expose its nuances, but I was nevertheless unsatisfied with his general conclusion. He does a great job of emphasizing that, even in a hyper-competitive, individualistic environment, people are better off if they identify a common cause and work together. But when examined closely, Watts’ final victory appears to reinforce the status quo more than anything else.

As a newly minted billionaire, Watts decides to share his fortune with three other characters who helped him win The Hunt. While this is certainly better than keeping all the money for himself, it’s not exactly humanistic in a general sense. Watts and his love interest talk vaguely about ending world hunger and making the world a better place, but it’s unclear exactly how they will go about it. Any student of history knows that money only goes so far when trying to ameliorate the the deep problems of human civilization. Despite their good intentions, Watts and his friends have not escaped the economic paradigm that currently reigns supreme in America and seems to have been exacerbated in Cline’s future: Wealth begets wealth, and those without it better do anything they can to get some or resign themselves to Malthusian subsistence poverty. Inducting a few more billionaires into the Fortune 500––even ones with good hearts––doesn’t help the world in any concrete way.

Cline’s parting message––that true happiness can only be found in the real world––is well meant but also at odds with the reality of his conclusion. If the real world has truly become as distasteful and dysfunctional as Cline makes it out to be, how are normal folks supposed to find happiness in it? One rags to riches story combined with a few billion dollars spent on humanitarian efforts doesn’t address the conceptual obstacle of seeing the world as a sorting machine for winners and losers––an idea hardly questioned and arguably endorsed by Ready Player One. The sad fact is that the OASIS is a much better world by almost every conceivable standard than the one it prompts its users to reject. Will giving people food and shelter make them want to leave the OASIS, or just make it easier for them to spend more time there? Will a handful of wealthy benefactors be enough to fix widespread ecosystem collapse and systemic institutional corruption? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Telling people to seek meaning and contentment within a broken reality instead of a virtual one, simply because it is “more real,” is both disingenuous and cynical––especially when the message comes from those with economic security. Wade Watts’ newfound privilege will allow him to seek happiness wherever he can find it, but the same is hardly true for the billions of other humans still caught in the cycles of poverty and social isolation that would have consumed him. Perhaps this problem can be addressed in Cline’s recently announced sequel, but as it is, I found his finale more than a little unsettling.  

Rating: 7/10